Cyanide Wells Read online

  He nodded and went back to the table.

  “Thanks, mister.” She raised the mug in both hands and drank.

  “You’re welcome. I’m John.” As in Johnny Crowe, the name that he’d borrowed for the journey, with his deckhand’s blessing. “What’s yours?”

  “Sam. Short for Samantha. Thanks for not making me drink alone.”

  “Drinking alone’s no good.”

  “But you were.”

  “Yes, I was. So tell me about yourself, Sam.”

  “What d’you want to know?”

  “Anything you care to reveal. You said you needed somebody to talk to, and you seem upset.”

  “Yeah, I’m upset. Got every right to be. My father…died last week.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  “Not as sorry as I was for Dad. He had it rough there toward the end. Twenty-one years with the mill, and they laid him off. No severance pay, and then they told him we had to be out of the house in thirty days. Dad sweated all his life for the company, and that’s how they repaid him. He worked his fingers to the bone for them—and us.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  “Me, my brother, and my mom. My brother got out, joined the army. I don’t even know where he is now. Mom died two years ago, cancer. I was all Dad had left.”

  Matt took the empty mug from her hands and went to the bar for a refill. Sam was hurting, that was for sure, and a few beers seemed poor comfort. But he wasn’t used to comforting others, especially strangers; that particular activity had never been a part of his life, except for the brief time he’d been married to Gwen.

  When he went back to the table, Sam was sitting very still, eyes focused on a beer sign depicting a mountain meadow. The tilt of her nose was delicate, her cheekbones and forehead high. She’d’ve been pretty if she weren’t in a disheveled, grief-stricken state. Matt set the beer in front of her, and she nodded thanks, keeping her gaze on the sign.

  She said, “I’m thinking maybe I’ll get out, too.”

  “And go where?”

  “Anyplace there’s a future. Everything’s dying here—the mill, the town. Pretty soon it’ll just be a wide spot on the freeway for people who want a cheap motel and the kind of crap I serve up at the Chicken Shack.”

  “I noticed one of the mills is closed.”

  “Yeah, and the other one’ll close later this year.”

  “Environmental regulations causing that?”

  “Not really. Talbot’s never relied on old-growth forests, like Pacific Lumber up in Scotia did. No, what happened is, it got sold. Ronnie Talbot, the last of the family that owned it, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the business. He was a faggot, and all he wanted was a lot of money so he could live high on the hog with his lover. This Portland company bought it, and they’re letting it fail so they can get the tax write-off.” Her lips curved up in a malicious smile. “At least Ronnie didn’t get to enjoy the money. Three months after the sale was final, somebody shot him and his lover at their house over by the Knob. Killed them both, right there in their bed.”

  That afternoon at the library, Matt had read the Soledad Spectrum’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series on the murders in a secluded home east of Cyanide Wells with more than usual interest. Many of the accounts had borne Gwen’s assumed name. In a way, it hadn’t surprised him; she was a talented reporter, and it was the logical thing for her to be doing here.

  Sam’s use of the word “somebody” didn’t jibe with the published accounts, though. “I thought they caught the guy who shot them.”

  “Well, Mack Travis confessed to it and hanged himself in his jail cell, but nobody here believes he did it. There was evidence that he’d been in Ronnie and Deke’s house that night, but Mack was always a couple of cards short of a full deck, and he was the type who’d confess to anything if anybody gave him half a chance. He had a peculiar relationship with his momma, if you know what I mean. Confessed because he thought the cops had him dead to rights, then offed himself because he didn’t want to shame her.”

  “That paper over in Cyanide Wells won a Pulitzer for their coverage of the murders, didn’t they?”

  “Uh-huh. Biggest thing that ever happened around here—of the good kind, I mean. I liked those articles. I’m no fan of faggots, but that Ardis Coleman, who wrote most of the stories, actually made me understand how lousy their situation is in a place like this.”

  “You ever meet her?”

  “Me? Do I look like somebody who hangs with Pulitzer Prize–winners? I’ve seen her in the supermarket, is all. And, of course, I used to read her.”

  “Used to?”

  “She quit the paper right after they won the prize, is writing a book about the murders.”

  Evidently had been writing it for close to three years now. She’d probably never finish it, let alone get it published. Gwen had lacked the ability to handle large projects; she agonized over term papers but was able to knock off a good newspaper article under extreme time pressure. But if she wasn’t working for the paper, how was she paying her bills?

  “Mister…John, what d’you think I should do?”

  The question startled him. “About what?”

  “Should I stay here or just chuck everything and go? What would you do in my place?”

  He thought for a moment, then imparted the sum total of his wisdom.

  “I’d go, but I’d also keep it in mind that no matter where you are, you’ll still be you. You’ll still be carrying the same old baggage.”

  Wednesday, May 8, 2002

  By the time Matt delivered Sam to the small company home that would soon cease to be hers—gently refusing her offer of a nightcap—it was after one. He drove back to his motel, stripped off his clothing, and got into the shower. After drying off, he wiped the steam from the mirror over the vanity and once again appraised his somewhat altered appearance.

  Yes, he was definitely a different man. A man created out of pain.

  After finally leaving Saugatuck, he thought he’d experienced enough pain for any one lifetime, but he hadn’t counted on his brother, Jeremy, compounding it.

  When in distress, Matt’s first impulse had always been to turn to family, and even after being rebuffed by his mother and father, he had thought he could count on his big brother. So he set out on the long drive to Albuquerque, what few possessions he hadn’t sold packed in his old Chevy Suburban. He didn’t bother to write or call; the brothers had extended standing invitations to visit each other without advance notice.

  Jeremy’s house was on Vassar Drive, a stucco ranch-style with a yard filled with gravel instead of grass, cacti instead of flowers. Four years before, Matt and Gwen had visited there, and the spare key Jeremy had given him was still on his key-chain. When Jeremy didn’t answer his ring, Matt checked the garage, saw no car, and let himself inside. In the kitchen he helped himself to a beer and sat down at the table to leaf through the help-wanted ads in a copy of the Journal that had been left there. Although the Southwest had never particularly charmed him, it was a long way from Minnesota, and distance was what he now craved.

  Some fifteen minutes later he heard the front door open. Footsteps came along the hallway, and Matt looked up in anticipation of seeing his brother’s face. Instead a woman came into the room, carrying a sack of groceries. She was short, blond, and slightly overweight, with a bland, pleasant expression that changed radically when she saw him.

  She gave a little cry, dropped the grocery bag, and shrank back against the doorjamb. Oranges rolled across the floor. Matt stood up, so quickly that he knocked over his chair.

  “Hey,” he said, holding his hands out. “Don’t be frightened. I’m Jer’s brother, Matt. I guess I should’ve phoned—”

  The woman whirled and fled down the hallway, sobbing.

  That was the end of Matt’s hopes of making a new start in Albuquerque.

  “She’s damaged,” Jeremy said later of his new wife, Marty. “I met her when I was doing volunteer work at a
center for victims of violent crimes. Two years ago a man invaded her home, shot her husband, and held her captive for twenty-two hours. Repeatedly raped her. Can you imagine what she thought when she found a total stranger in our kitchen?”

  “I’m not a ‘total stranger.’ And how come you didn’t let me know you’d gotten married?”

  Jeremy’s expression became remote, as it always did when he was preparing to lie. “We’ve only been married six weeks. I planned to tell you the next time we talked.”

  But when would that have been? During the past year and a half their phone conversations had tapered off to once every three months or so. “Do the folks know?”

  “Why would I tell them? The last time I spoke with Mom was when I bought this house. I thought she’d be proud of me for getting my act together. Instead she all but accused me of making the down payment with profits from drug deals.”

  “I’ve tried to explain to them—”

  “I know you have. But they’re not going to listen to what they don’t want to hear. They’ve always been good at labeling people, and my label was pasted on the day I was convicted of dealing.”

  “Well, you’re not alone in that. They’ve labeled me, too. About Marty—is she gonna be okay?”

  “She’ll be fine. She’s cooking her special spaghetti for dinner, in honor of your visit.”

  But Marty wasn’t fine. That night at dinner she fidgeted and refused to make eye contact with Matt and finally excused herself before they were finished eating. As he and Jeremy loaded dishes in the washer, Matt said, “Something’s still bothering her, and it’s not because I scared her this afternoon.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do. She’s afraid of me, your wife-killer brother.”

  “Oh, Matt, don’t go there.”

  “In spite of what you’ve told her, she believes I did it.”

  Jeremy began scrubbing a pot, steam clouding his glasses.

  Matt said, “You did tell her I’m innocent?”

  No reply.

  “You do believe I’m innocent?”

  Jeremy looked up, shut off the water. Steam coated his lenses, but through it Matt could see the fear in his eyes.

  Give him an out. Don’t let this turn ugly.

  “Well, don’t feel disloyal, brother,” he said. “Maybe I did do it.”

  The next morning he left his brother’s house for good.

  After that, what he thought of as his wandering years began. From New Mexico he drove across Arizona and into Southern California. In San Diego he worked two months for a contractor, mainly doing demolition work, then moved on north. All the way up the coast to Oregon he camped out or stayed in cheap motels or hostels, spending frugally, then cut inland to Portland.

  In the window of a Portland secondhand bookshop he saw a Help Wanted sign. He worked there as a clerk for six months while living at the YMCA. The city was nice enough, but he became restless and once again headed north, stopping in Seattle. He’d always been drawn to cities on the water, and he liked the hills and sweeping vistas, so he rented a room in a residential hotel and got on with another contractor; within two months he began scanning the want ads for more permanent quarters. But then a chance encounter near Pioneer Square changed his plans.

  “Matt! Matt Lindstrom!” a man’s voice had called out.

  He turned and found himself face-to-face with Dave Kappel, one of his former students. Dave, ever the motormouth, grasped his hand and pumped it, chattering.

  “So this is where you’re living now. Guess you wanted to get away from that rotten town, and I sure don’t blame you. Shitty, the way people treated you after your wife disappeared.”

  Matt opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t living in Seattle, was merely a tourist, but Dave went on, oblivious. “I came out here last fall. I’m a staff photographer on the Post-Intelligencer. Married, too. Kid on the way. Fast work, huh? Why don’t you give me your phone number? We’d love to have you to dinner.”

  Automatically Matt gave him the number of the phone that only rang for work-related calls.

  “Great, man,” Dave said as he scribbled it down. “You know what I’m thinking? I’ll talk to a reporter I work with about doing a feature on the shit deal you got back in Saugatuck. Use photos I’ve got of the place, take others to show you in your new life. Unfounded rumor, innuendo, wrecking a life, but in the end you triumph. Way cool. People eat up that kind of thing.”

  Just his luck, Matt thought. The only person from Saugatuck who was on his side—and only for purposes of personal gain—had to be on the staff of the major newspaper in a city where he’d flirted with the idea of settling.

  He was on the ferry to Vancouver, B.C., the next morning.

  For the next year he traveled about British Columbia: east to the Rockies, up to the edge of the Northwest Territories, down to Prince Rupert, then back to Vancouver. He stayed mainly in small towns, picked up work when and where he could, and was charmed by the friendliness and courtesy of the people. By the time he boarded the B.C. Ferry for Vancouver island, he was seriously considering taking up permanent residence in the province.

  Another chance encounter, this one more fortunate than the incident in Seattle, turned possibility into reality. While strolling along the pier in Port Regis the morning after he’d checked into the hotel, he met Ned Webster, owner and operator of the Queen Charlotte. A garrulous man in his mid-sixties, Ned responded with pride and pleasure to Matt’s questions about his handsome craft and allowed him to pilot her during a free harbor tour. Later, over drinks in the hotel bar, his interest in Matt became apparent: He was looking for a partner who would buy the business when he decided to retire—but not just any partner. The Queen Charlotte’s new captain would have to be a man who would appreciate her and maintain her in the style to which she was accustomed. Matt, Ned told him, had passed the test.

  By the next afternoon Matt had requested that his Minnesota bank wire the funds necessary to buy into Webster Marine Charters. The following morning the local real estate agent took him to look at the run-down cabin with the view of the sea and Bear Rock. By that afternoon he’d put in a second request to his bank for the funds to buy it.

  His second life, the wandering years, was over, and his third life had begun.

  As he stood staring into the mirror in his motel room in Talbot’s Mills, he reflected that by leaving British Columbia he’d ended that life and embarked upon yet another. His fourth life would not be nearly as pleasant as the last, but it would surely make up for the pain that had ended his first.

  Cyanide Wells lay in a wide meadow some twenty-five miles southeast of Talbot’s Mills, near the Eel River National Forest. High grass, as yet unbrowned, rippled on either side of the well-paved two-lane highway, and clusters of ranch buildings appeared in the distance. Ahead, under a clear blue sky, lay the rolling, pine- and aspen-covered foothills of the forest, and above them towered a bald, rounded outcropping that Matt assumed was the formation called the Knob.

  The previous afternoon in the library he’d read about the town and learned it was a former gold-mining camp, once called Seven Wells because of its abundant underground springs. In its heyday in the 1860s its population had numbered nearly ten thousand, and it had boasted of five hotels, three general stores, various shops, twenty boarding houses, twenty-seven saloons, seventeen brothels, and two churches. The rocky Knob contained one of the richest veins of ore in the northwestern part of California, but the mines were eventually played out and abandoned. Seven Wells was on the verge of becoming a ghost town when, in 1900, cyaniders, as they were known, from a Denver mining company arrived, equipped with knowledge of how to use the deadly poison to extract gold from the waste dumps, tailings, and what low-grade ore remained in the earth. A bitter rivalry between one of their engineering team and an old Cornish miner with a small, poor claim had resulted in the poisoning of the seven public wells for which the town was named—an incident so notor
ious that the popular appellation of Cyanide Wells took hold and was years later made official, even though the water supply had long since been cleansed. By now most of the wells had run dry.

  The town and its contrast to Talbot’s Mills took Matt by surprise. The business district consisted of two blocks of restored false-fronted buildings, and on the side streets tidy, Victorian-era cottages mingled with larger, more contemporary dwellings. Bed-and-breakfasts abounded. Although Starbuck’s hadn’t yet invaded, Aram’s Coffee Shop was doing a turn-away business; Dead People’s Stuff offered “fine antiques”; the Good Earth Bakery advertised fresh focaccia; Mamma Mia’s featured lobster ravioli; the Main Street Diner looked to be a takeoff on the Hard Rock Cafe. Everything was freshly painted and too tidy and seemed a counterfeit of the real world. As he drove along, Matt began to feel nostalgia for Port Regis’s rough edges.

  He soon located the Soledad Spectrum in a white frame building with Wedgwood blue trim, sandwiched between M’Lady’s Boutique and the Thai Issan restaurant. Cars and trucks and campers lined the curbs, and there wasn’t a parking space to be had, so he pulled off onto a side street and walked back, his camera slung around his neck. As he merged with the people on the sidewalk, he took in details with his photographer’s eyes. For twelve years he’d shunned his true calling, but he’d never stopped looking at his surroundings as if through the lens.

  Couples in shorts and T-shirts, holding hands the way they did when on their own in a strange place, took in the sights. Locals in casual or business attire entered and exited Bank of Soledad, First American Title, State Farm Insurance, Redwood Cleaners, and Tuttle Drugs. Children, on some sort of field trip from grade school, walked in line behind their teacher, clutching at a colorful braided rope like a litter of puppies on a lead. Old men lounged on a bench in a park by a stone-walled well—presumably one of the seven that had been poisoned over a century before. Several women in flowered dresses sipped cappuccino at a wrought-iron table in front of the Wells Mercantile. At the post office, newspaper racks were lined up on the sidewalk: everything from the New York Times to the Soledad Spectrum.